Chapter 17: Deploying Office 2003 Settings

Chapter 17

Deploying Office 2003 Settings

Microsoft Office 2003 Editions is extremely flexible and highly customizable. Users can customize Office 2003 Editions through its settings, custom templates, tools, and much more. For example, an accounting department can create custom templates for expense reports, and IT professionals can create custom dictionaries that contain computer terminology and product names. Users can customize everything from how their toolbars look to the file formats for saving documents. Almost all these settings are in the registry.

IT professionals can customize user settings and distribute standard Office 2003 Editions configurations to all users. First install Office 2003 Editions on a sample computer, and then customize the toolbars, settings, templates, dictionaries, and any other options for each program. Run the Microsoft Office 2003 Profile Wizard to create an Office Profile Settings (OPS) file that contains all these settings. If you add the OPS file to a transform (MST) file, your customized settings are included when you install Office 2003 Editions on client computers. The Microsoft Office 2003 Custom Installation Wizard is the tool that you use to build MST files. It enables you to customize settings directly in the MST file without using an OPS file. You can also use the Custom Installation Wizard to set user options and to edit registry entries.

The Profile Wizard and the Custom Installation Wizard are part of the Microsoft Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit, which you can find in the ORK folder on any Office 2003 Editions Enterprise Edition CD. You can also download it from http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork. Because the resource kit's tools are covered comprehensively in the resource kit book, I won't go into detail about them. Instead, I'll focus on how to use these tools to deploy user settings, which are essentially registry settings. And if you're interested in learning about specific Office 2003 Editions settings, including Office 2003 Editions policies and where to find them in the registry, see Part IV, “Appendixes.”

TIP
Most of the tools in the Microsoft Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit are useful for more than just deploying Office 2003 Editions. For example, you can use the Profile Wizard to deploy settings for any program, and with the Custom Installation Wizard, you can customize other Microsoft Windows Installer–based applications. You can even use the Profile Wizard to customize Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 (Windows) if you're prone to frequent reinstallation.